Over on Facebook – where, I might have mentioned, you can ‘like’ us to your heart’s content right here – someone had the bright idea of setting a challenge to select a song a day on thirty different topics. As music is such a big part of my life anyway, I thought I would combine that idea with The Memory Blog during April (April having the right number of days). Which means that you get a new post every day this month, with a song at the end, too.

Once I became a lawyer, it was inevitable that my love of music was going to, at some point, cross over into my working life. At first, this happened by accident. At the start of the 1990s the popularity of certain bands in Manchester led to a mass sign-up of just about every half-decent Mancunian band by the nation’s record companies.

A couple of years later they realised that most of these bands were never going to make a profit and began suing to get their money back. I was in an ideal place to defend a number of those bands and, afterwards, I used that experience to set up a practice providing advice to bands on the record contracts that they were being offered.

I took that practice with me as I moved about the country and it was most successful during the six years that I spent in Reading at the start of the century. During that time I advised many bands and singers. Some of them became successful. Some of them didn’t. One of them, a few years after I had advised them, sent me scurrying to the archives to dig out the ten page letter I had sent advising them not to sign a contract, after another lawyer had mentioned to me that the band had had the worst deal they had ever seen from a record company.

This band never made it. There’s no real reason for that. Sometimes the industry smiles upon you. Sometimes, no matter how good you are, it doesn’t. And then life moves on. However, the one thing that you cannot deny is that this is just about the most perfect description of lying on a beach or in a garden on a warm summer day. I don’t have much trouble getting to sleep, but if I ever want to drift off whilst blocking out the world around me, this is the song I call up from my memory. Unfortunately, I cannot get the music or video files to embed into this post, nor can I create a hyperlink to them, but please copy and paste this into your browser and have a listen. http://www.myspace.com/ewbutcher/videos/video/2530880